Friday, July 17

Making the Trek to the Bishop's Storehouse

Before we get to the trek, I have a bit of a "Yay" moment:

We have been harvesting lots of our tiny cherry tomatoes from the garden. They are about the size of a penny, and so cute. Alice has seen me pick them enough that yesterday when I was picking the first large tomatoes of the season, she cleaned off a vine including the green ones. Looks like we need to learn colors.

Anyway, the large tomatoes we picked weren't quite ripe, but I couldn't help but eat tomato sandwiches with the almost ripe yellow tomato. It was so yummy and quite mild. Its also huge. Its larger than my beefsteak tomatoes and much larger than the 'vine ripe' tomato I still have from the store. They must be really happy in my garden.

Anyway, at 9am(ish) Alice and I headed East. We took the turnpike, and only missed one turn. The food storage center is in some strange warehouse/business park type place, and I didn't see the road name until it was too late. I went to the next turn and turned around.

Then of course once I was in the warehouse area, I passed the storehouse. Its the second right, and its not listed at the street. In fact none of the buildings have addresses listed until the 3800s (the storehouse was at 3601). Alice also woke up around the time I couldn't figure out which warehouse it was and was pretty upset she was in the carseat.

Then, lady inside acted like she had no clue I was coming. Even though I called several days in advance, but oh well. I gave her my order and we got it all together.

FYI, if you have never bought just cans from the storehouse, they are expensive. And pretty darn bulky, but I knew about the bulky thing. So yeah, I can see why people were wanting mylar bags, they are only 35 cents each instead of $1 (for the can and the lid). If I can figure out how to remove the metal ring after the cans are open, it will only be 20 cents for lids to replace them. But I don't know if that is possible.

Anyway, we loaded up, paid and started home. Silly me forgot to print out return directions, but I figured I would follow the same route back, right?

Wrong.

You see, when I was on 670 -> 70West there was this semi driving a little scary (like changing lanes frequently, and he wasn't even passing anyone, I guess he was lost or at least confused). I was sort of bummed to see him taking the same exit as me, but figured it would be fine. So there were 2 lanes that exited to 70W and I thought he was in the eastern most one, and I was in the next lane. Only, since he was so big and wouldn't go faster or slower than me, I didn't see that magically a second lane appeared to his left until it was too late to get ahead of him, and it would have been dangerous to slow down and get behind.

I was stuck going to 35.

It wasn't that bad. 35 was empty most of the way down to 435/K10, and except for the strange habit people had of driving 5 mph under the speed limit in the middle lane, it was totally fine. The speed thing wouldn't have even bothered me, except we were passed by a couple of packs of cars, and people driving in packs make stupid lane changes.

So we are home and safe, and aside from a car, rather full of food storage canning supplies, not much has changed. Except we have less gas in the tank. Gas was only one penny cheaper in Missouri than here in town, it was probably because I was off in the middle of nowhere Kansas City, MO instead of a business area. I choose to not fill the tank since Alice was pretty bummed that we were getting in the car again.